851 ELSG commander talks enterprise challenges at MAC breakfast Published June 29, 2007 By Monica D. Morales ESC Public Affairs Hanscom AFB, MA, -- Providing future Airmen with a seamless application to retrieve the data they need, when they need it will require working through the challenges of the present, said Col. Jim Shaw, 851st Electronic Systems Group commander, during the June 21 Military Affairs Council breakfast at Max Stein's in Lexington. The speech to the mixed government-industry crowd was based off of his work derived from his last position as the 554th Electronic Systems Wing's vice director. On June 18, Colonel Shaw took command of the 851 ELSG. "Moving into the future, the Airman warrior wants to come to a single place, get the information he or she needs ... and not really care what program or subsystem provided that information," he said. For the 554 ELSW this transition means moving away from the wing's past heritage of individual programs that bring with them different processes and organizational cultures, and toward a future supporting a single system that integrates finance, logistics and personnel systems. An example of melding these three components into one system is the Air Force's Global Combat Support System. GCSS-AF implements a vision of modernized Air Force combat support operations through a set of Air Force enterprise services. "The user goes to this one seamless application ... and essentially gets data in one instance, and then plugs that into other environments like those of Transportation Command's or Defense Logistics Agency's," Colonel Shaw said. This ushers in the new approach to information technology systems - service-oriented architecture, which allows for the leveraging of existing assets and enables inevitable technology changes. "The exciting thing about this is that if you look at the various architectures in combat support and ops support programs ... we are taking the best of all three and moving forward with a single solid approach," he said. But, Colonel Shaw said, it isn't always easy to get to the goal of that single approach, and that's when organizations have to pull together to overcome challenges by mastering several disciplines. "We have to set an operating model that serves as a concept of operations, and that lays out the processes for delivering services," Colonel Shaw said. Also key is establishing the enterprise architecture that organizes the logic for processes and IT infrastructure. Building off those points, the colonel provided a three-step game plan that aims to help organizations better ease into the SOA. The first states that the SOA doesn't fall to a single organization, but instead is a collaborative effort that needs to drive consensus and not set out mandates. The second requires senior leaders guiding the top-level vision built off of the consensus from the working level. "Finally, we need to drive that consensus through our senior leaders to make it all happen," he said.